Texas scientist plays against type at the EPA
Advisory board chief keeps open mind on issues
WASHINGTON — When Michael Honeycutt was named the chairman of the Environmental Protection Agency’s Science Advisory board last fall, environmentalists expected the worst.
As director of toxicology at the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, he spent more than two decades fighting EPA efforts to put stricter controls on everything from ozone to mercury to hexavalent chromium — the cancer-causing agent made famous in the Julia Roberts film, “Erin Brockovich.” With a national platform, he was expected him to speed along the Trump administration’s efforts to roll back a decade’s worth of regulations aimed at oil, gas and other fossil fuel industries.
Honeycutt, however, is not playing along, leading the board in its recent decision to review the science behind a host of controversial EPA policies, such as repealing the Clean Power Plan, which aims to limit greenhouse gas emissions. That, along with his demand
that EPA turn over data behind its decision-making, has left the most suspicious environmentalists, if not praising Honeycutt, at least reassessing the Texas toxicologist.
“The chairman appears to be playing the role of a traditional chairman more than an outspoken critic” of environmental regulation, said John Walke, clean air director at the Natural Resources Defense Council, a national advocacy group.
No one expects Honeycutt’s conversion to treehugger, but during his short tenure leading the advisory panel, a more complex picture has emerged of a man whose views on pollution and public health have been criticized as outside the mainstream — from disputing research that found increased exposure to ozone leads to more deaths to opposing tougher mercury standards by arguing that Japanese eat a lot of mercury-rich fish and have high IQs.
But those who know him and follow his work describe a public health official who is skeptical of the reigning scientific consensus, but also committed to following established scientific protocols and seeking out dissenting views. Ivan Rusyn, the chair of interdisciplinary toxicology program at Texas A&M University, where Honeycutt has served as an adjunct professor, said Honeycutt is well-respected in the field, his pro-industry views not in the majority, but also not on the fringe.
In many ways, Honeycutt is emblematic of the field of toxicology itself, Rusyn said. While determining whether a pollutant poses risks to human health might appear straightforward, it is far from an exact science.
Not as easy as it looks
Human testing is mostly out of bounds, so scientists rely on animal testing to study the impact on health of say, industrial chemicals or pesticides Those studies, however, are often limited in scope and not always the best gauge, leaving plenty of room for interpretation. The issue become more complex for regulators, who must balance economic with environmental effects in determining what levels of pollutants are reasonable.
“There’s uncertainties all over this process,” Rusyn said. “It is my opinion Mike is not a stooge and a puppet for industry. He is a leader and a very effective one at the state level.”
Honeycutt was named chairman of the advisory panel last year by the controversial EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt, who resigned Thursday under the cloud of several ethics investigations. Pruitt, a climate change skeptic who aggressively attacked environmental rules adopted during the Obama administration, was succeeded by Acting EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler, a former coal lobbyist and veteran Republican staffer on Capitol Hill.
Wheeler is expected to continue the regulatory rollback that Honeycutt and the advisory board will review to determine whether science supports the policies.
In June, the more than 40 scientists serving on the board met a half mile north of the White House at the Washington Plaza hotel to decide whether to review EPA’s recent regulatory actions as well as a proposal to stop the EPA from considering public health studies that use confidential data — a common practice among scientists designed to protect the privacy of patients and companies. Critics, however, say the practice allows scientists to operate without scrutiny.
It was the first meeting since Pruitt reshuffled the board’s membership to increase representation by industry. Some veteran board members wondered how the new chairman would handle the meeting, whether he would try to hold up their attempt to put the EPA’s policy making under a microscope.
But they needn’t have worried. Honeycutt started quickly into the agenda and kept on point, without “weighing in with his own opinions,” said Chris Frey, an environmental engineering professor at North Carolina State University and board member.
In addition to examining the Clean Power Plan repeal, the board elected to review other controversial EPA decisions, including the repeal of tougher methane regulations on oil and gas wells and the roll back of vehicle emissions standards.
“There was an open conversation about these issues, and it was very positive,” said Steve Hamburg, another board member and chief scientist at the Environmental Defense Fund, which has hounded Pruitt mercilessly since he took office last year.
Honeycutt declined to be interviewed, only answering questions by email. Asked about reviewing EPA’s decision-making, he said he agreed with the board, which he described as composed of, “highly qualified and extremely intelligent scientists whom I deeply respect.”
“I attempted to make sure that every board member had their opinions heard and questions answered,” he said.
Mad Hatters
Created by Congress in 1978 to help clean the nation’s dirty air and waterways, the science advisory board is charged with checking whether EPA actions align with established science. If the EPA, for instance, tightens ozone regulations, it needs to cite scientific studies showing that doing so will save lives. And while the board’s guidance is strictly advisory, not following it can leave administrators on shaky ground politically and in the courts if regulatory changes become the subjects of lawsuits.
Honeycutt, 51, joined the TCEQ in the mid-1990s after earning a doctorate in toxicology and pharmacology at the University of Louisiana-Monroe. He described his approach as trying to find a balance between “protecting public health and the environment and allowing industrial activity.”
“The TCEQ successfully achieves both goals by writing permits that allow release of chemicals into the environment at concentrations that do not cause harm,” he said
That approach helped in industry-friendly Texas, where Honeycutt was named head of TCEQ’s toxicology divison in 2003. But while endearing himself to Republican lawmakers, he has also made himself a controversial figure among environmentalists.
When EPA was moving ahead on tougher mercury standards in 2011, Honeycutt appeared before Congress to argue against stricter limits on the toxin, which is pumped into the air as a byproduct of coal power generation and has been linked to neurological disorders since the days of the “Mad Hatters,” who used mercury in hatmaking in 19th century London. In his testimony, he discounted the threat, noting that Japanese eat 10 times more fish than Americans do,” but score highly on IQ tests. Nearly all fish contain traces of mercury.
In 2015, as EPA prepared to enact standards lowering the amount of ozone that Americans are forced to breathe, Honeycutt argued during a radio interview that “people are going to die” if ozone pollution — associated with asthma and other lung diseases — was reduced. He based the claim on an obscure EPA finding that as overall ozone pollution declines, it also increases in some smaller, isolated areas for short periods of time.
That won Honeywell support from the power sector and the Gulf Coast petrochemical complex, which emit pollutants that contribute to higher ozone levels.
“His opinions, they're out of step with the mainstream scientific community,” said Luke Metzger, director of the activist group Environment Texas. “Time and time again he ends up supporting the polluting industries. ”
Honeycutt then spent $1.65 million to hire a Massachusetts consulting firm, Gradient Corp., whose clients include industry groups such as the American Petroleum Institute, to try to refute public health studies that found increased ozone levels increase deaths among the broader public. That drew attacks not only from environmental activists, but also fellow scientists. In 2015, Joel Schwartz, a professor of environmental epidemiology at Harvard University, told the Texas Tribune that Graident used questionable science to “trash environmental studies.”
Tug of war
Science has always been more divided and prone to conflict than political leaders like to acknowledge. But in joining the EPA’s advisory board under the Trump administration, Honeycutt finds himself in the company of scientists far removed from the academic institutions from which such appointments usually originate.
Pruitt, a climate change skeptic, had steadily replaced academics from institutions such as the University of Michigan and Ohio State University with industry scientists from the likes of the Houston refiner Phillips 66 and the French oil major Total.
Among them is Stanley Young, a former top scientist at the pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly. Young, selected for the advisory board last year, believes the issue of climate change “to be up for grabs” and has spent years arguing that a landmark Harvard study linking increased air pollution to higher mortality rates is wrong.
“There are people who think the science that has been published has been settled,” Young said. “As a general thing, science is never settled, it’s always open to new data and reanalysis.”
Young was complimentary about Honeycutt, noting that in Texas, he was critical of many EPA decisions. But he also criticized the board’s decision to review EPA policies, arguing that decisions on issues like the Clean Power Plan were matters of policy, not of science.
Which side Honeywell ultimately ends up on remains to be seen He will have plenty more opportunities to rile up environmentalists and scientists in Washington as he did in Austin.
And already, some are gearing up for a fight.
“I don’t see any indication he’s changed his points of view,” said Walke, the NRDC attorney. “I expect them to erupt at future board meetings.”